The Last Word On Nothing

In the week leading up to a rare total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. Craig missed out on the last eclipse, reminding us that the moon is not the only important thing under the sun.

I’m not at the totality today, and it’s been gnawing at me. Between 1 and 7 million people are estimated to witness this swath of darkness across the middle of North America from coast to coast. I live about an eight-hour drive away, and I’ve heard totality is a mystical experience, once in a lifetime. Your inner picture of the earth, possibly the entire cosmos can change. I’ve driven eight hours for far less.

I did see a minor solar eclipse once. I was in the bare boned desert of southern Utah, and at first I thought my eyesight was failing. As half-light settled, I realized it wasn’t me. It was summer…or at least a warm month…and I remember lifting a hand to block the sun. There was not a cloud, not a visible reason for this shift, buttes and palisades losing their sharpness around me. It had to have been an eclipse. The light was almost silvery. Even though I knew the basic science, how the moon casts its own shadow onto Earth, I still thought a little bit of the world was ending.

After several minutes, the white light of the sun was back to its blinding self. My sublime sense of dread had faded, replaced by a magnificent sense of motion on a scale far beyond my body on the ground.

With that experience behind me, I’d drop anything to experience totality eight hours away. I was born for this event, every cell of me made to feel the path of spheres through the sky, practically dizzy from the revolutions of my planet underfoot on a daily basis. When the moon rises, do you gasp, too?

So, why am I not there?

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In the week leading up to a rare total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. Cassie and her husband Soren captured a remarkable recording last time, memorializing Baby’s First Eclipse.

A couple of months ago, I hatched a really good plan. My husband and I would drive six hours into the path of totality without our two-year-old daughter. We would have a relaxing car ride, followed by some nice meals at fancy St. Louis restaurants. But then I realized that no one was available to watch our two-year-old, so we had to take her with.

I could write a long post about the unspeakable freakiness of seeing a total eclipse. Or about the uselessness of trying to make a two-year-old wear eclipse glasses. But I can’t say anything that others haven’t already said. So instead I invite you to join my family as we experience totality. The following three-minute audio clip was recorded and produced by Radiolab’s managing editor, Soren Wheeler. I got it for free because he’s also my husband.

What: A total eclipse!

Where: Dr. Edmund A. Babler Memorial State Park, just outside St. Louis, Missouri

Who: Me, my husband, our two-year-old, and a bunch of eclipse-happy strangers

Why: Because my science writer friends told me that 85% would not be good enough. Not by a long shot.

In the week leading up to a total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. Helen’s phone died before the last eclipse, and thank goodness for that, because now we have her charming drawings to capture its spirit.

I’m writing this from a traffic jam on I-95.

When we were choosing days on the schedule for Eclipse Week, nobody wanted the responsibility of writing a post the day of the eclipse. Because I have an overactive sense of duty, I signed up for this post, then joked that I’d be writing it on I-95, from the world’s worst traffic jam, on my phone.

Well, the joke’s on me; my phone died.

Surely no one can expect anything coherent from me, from the right lane of an interstate somewhere south of Fayetteville, NC. Instead, I present some eclipse impressions.

1. Traffic. The drawing that starts this post is from the worst traffic we hit on Saturday, on I-95 between Washington, D.C., and Fredericksburg. Here’s the thing, though – I think that may have been normal August weekend traffic. Apparently taking 2.5 hours to go 30 miles is not that unusual. (It was many hours after that traffic jam that my phone gave up its fight. Fortunately, I also brought a laptop.)

2. Eclipse party. For Monday’s eclipse-viewing fun, we consulted a list of NASA-affiliated events and chose a park in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, where the moon was supposed to cover the sun for a minute and 55 seconds of totality. Laura Penny, an astronomy professor at the College of Charleston, had coordinated more than a dozen parties at neighborhoods around the area, hosted by professors and students. Penny herself hosted ours, with her kids, friends, and mom, many of them in matching t-shirts. Here’s Penny projecting the image of the as-yet-uneclipsed sun through a telescope onto a piece of paper.

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In the week leading up to a rare total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. Ann, always the contrarian, looks right when everyone is looking left, and down when everyone else is looking up. This post first appeared in 2017.

So, LWON is eclipsing, on into next week.  And if the internet is to be believed, half the country will be pulled north and the other half south and they’ll converge in the middle, on the path of totality.  It’s charming, how a population that normally lives at arm’s length from earthly reality — milk in cartons, bears in zoos — is moved to get up close to this few minutes of celestial reality.  I’m moved too, but I’m not in the path and I’m not going anywhere.  And I’m not even going to look up, I’m going to look down.  Because last time I saw a partial eclipse, I had an epiphany.

A sub-section of the internet tells people like me how to watch the eclipse without frying retinas, hopefully by buying its special glasses with which to look at the disappearing sun.  And a sub-section of that sub-section says not to look up at the sky at all, but at the ground on which you’ve placed a piece of paper, and over that paper you hold a piece of cardboard in which you’ve made a tiny hole, a pinhole.  Look at the paper on the ground and you’ll see a tiny image of the eclipse.

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In the week leading up to a rare total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclips writing from the People of LWON. Our Christie and her father, Friend of LWON Dee Friesen, have a long tradition of eclipse appreciation, the last decade of which is shared here.

From the 2017 eclipse:

You may have heard that there’s a total solar eclipse happening on Monday. I have known about this event for at least five or six years, which is how long my dad has been planning for it. Dad already had me pretty excited for the eclipse, but after reading David Baron’s delightful book, American Eclipse, and interviewing him for our FiveThirtyEight science podcast, I’m all in. (Listen to Baron’s Story Collider or TED talk, and you’ll have eclipse fever too.) I’ll be meeting up with Dad and Mom and numerous friends in Casper, Wyoming to witness two minutes and 26 seconds of totality. In advance, I called up my dad to get some last minute thoughts.

CHRISTIE: Why is this eclipse such a big deal?

DAD: Well, number one, it goes all the way across the U.S., so a large part of the country is eligible to see it. Two, it’s a mid-day event, so people don’t have to get up early or stay up late to see it. Social media has helped it get much more publicity than it might have had in the past, and many more people are taking advantage of this to make money and all that.

It’s also an event of the universe outside of our political world. There’s nothing controversial about it; nothing not to like about it. And so many people live within a three hour drive of totality.

CHRISTIE: What’s your plan for watching?

DAD: I’m going to find a spot to wait for it under some trees where it’s cool. I will bring my little telescope with an oil-filtered eye piece that can project an image so that five or six people can see it.

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In the week leading up to a rare total solar eclipse, we bring you a daily lineup of eclipse writing from the People of LWON. This piece was contributed as a guest post in 2017 by our own dear Becky, who has since joined us full time.

2017 was the year of the Great American Eclipse, and I live in its path. I also write about the Earth, moon, and sun for a living. So I was determined to not only cover the eclipse, but own it. Like many creative people, I am happiest when I am doing work for myself, and much of my job satisfaction comes from convincing (or trying to convince) other people to care about my interests as much as I do. So the eclipse was both something I wanted to experience, and something I ardently wanted Americans to experience together. But when you invest great meaning in your work, even creative work can weigh on you like freight.

I immersed myself in eclipse ephemera for months. I talked to countless people who study them and travel the world to witness them, for science and pleasure. But as the Earth turned toward the summer solstice, I realized I burdened the eclipse — and, I’ll be honest, myself — with an almost unfairly massive load. By mid-July, I worried, What if this is dull? What if my work is dull?

As eclipse day neared, I prepared to be disappointed. I thought we might miss it. The day before the eclipse, the National Weather Service called for clouds over St. Louis, where I live with my family. We decided to get up early and drive east. I slept maybe 2 hours that night. I knew I would be rising well before the sun did, and piling everyone into the car to flee for a cloudless sky. I was consumed with dread and near-certainty that it would not be worth it.

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